I can't avoid the sneaking feeling that Massive Open Online Courses are a crude, inefficient solution to the problem. If we look back at Plato and Socrates, it seems evident that education is primarily a response to citizenship, and so it is more primary and adequate when citizenship fulfills our needs as students, than when an outside agent, such as an internet platform, does. Plato's Academy (citing The Republic) was a response to failures of citizenship. But in today's relative world, there is no need for a failure of citizenship, and organizations that do not make use of citizen functions are inevitably uncoordinated about genuine needs. Genuine needs occur through infrastructure, and that is where the citizen functions. Outside of citizenship is outside of infrastructure. By merely supplementing, or even neglecting people's needs as citizens, Massive Open Online Classes are proven to be inefficient compared to direct citizen-government functions. Perhaps people are judged to be too needy to function with government. But if government has already adopted charity programs for the disabled, and for worker's compensation, why not use charity as an incentive program, paying small sums for creative projects or community organization, etc. If these themes of compensation were more structured, like some research agencies and community outreach, much more meaningful things would be accomplished than online education. Corroboration would take place on a personal, vertically-integrated, and global level, without any intermediaries or secondary concepts of the economy. The major thing standing in the way, as I see it, is not really MOOCs, so much as the conventions of thinking about government and education. People get fogged over with an idea that government entails a certain form of thinking, or that education is never compensated. But, replacing some forms of charity with meriticious incentives could result in some major advances in social organization and research, with a minimum of information structuring. Add computers and it's ^2. But like square numbers, you can't get the total without adding up the parts. And the way to do that is to have people function individually, or to have computers function through correspondence, not individuals distending themselves over the internet by deference to a secondary system in which, just as in standard education, social and individual achievements are ignored.

I find myself in a system in which government has paid me more money for nothing than I've earned from the sum total of my remarkable achievements. It would be value from nothing to be paid the same money in recognition of what I do as an individual. The MOOC platform is just an extension of the problem of ignoring theories of value in modern society. The only way to get value is to pay people for what they actually do. If that doesn't work, then you only pay them after they do it. If that doesn't work, then you pay them less money. The only way where paying someone less money doesn't work is when someone doesn't do anything at all. But in an information economy pockets emerge of people who do a lot of informational things, but aren't being paid any money except charity. A more efficient use of money would be to reward people for the things they're already doing, with the money you're already giving them, and using that as a platform for organizing theories of usefulness, value, and information, organizationally, socially, and thematically.

The info-idealists building their personal pyramids should't suffer because of other people blundering and making mistakes. Re-hashing old problems has lost its cachet. Where linguists were talking about the need for 'new language' we now need 'new logic'. Even if it's not a philosopher's job, there is room for greater mutual recognition between economic concepts and social realities.

Moocs are the future. Anyone willing to put in the effort can learn and then practically apply what they are learning. I'm 55 and am learning about the new technology available and a foreign language. I intend to explore the world and apply the new technology to a practical business application. It is also far superior to the quality of education I received at my university because of the medium and access to the best teachers.

You can't beat:
1) the cost,
2) the quality of the teachers (some of the best in the world),
3) the content (current and relevant, not from a textbook which takes a committee and time to change),
4) the medium (at your own pace and the ability to save to your computer video lectures, notes, materials, etc. to review anytime),
5) the community (global vs. your local university),
6) a customized education making it relevant to one's end objective in taking the class.

All are far superior than what most people in the world can obtain locally from their university.

It's going to change the world and individuals from countries that don't have the means but have the will to learn will create and build on their education permitting them to improve their standard of living.

Thanks to all the MOOC's and their supporters for really making a difference in the world!

This author provides no PROOF that these MOOCs actually, effectively teach people anything. I'm amazed this article was even published, considering the MOOC experiment at SJSU failed miserably. The MOOC project was canned because more than half of the students FAILED. Deleting teachers and classrooms from the learning equation through MOOCS is not the answer. This article sounds like a commercial, not a well thought out opinion. MOOCS, to me, don't sound like they benefit anyone but the dotcom entrepreneurs who want to make a quick buck at our colleges' and students' expense.

The old business model for universities was to make students second. The rule of publish or perish for professor's forced their priorities to put students second and prestige via publishing for the university first. We all knew we weren't the professor's priority. MOOCS put students first and expose students to other cultures and ways of thinking due to the large class size and global community. In time, universities will need to change their business model in order to effectively compete for student tuition, research dollars and prestige.

In reply to A Professor:
I can offer proof, in the way of personal testimony, that MOOCs do teach people.

Two years ago, I could not have told you who Vint Cert was. As a result of one class, offered by the University of Michigan on the Coursera Platform, I became far more aware of many of the early pioneers of the internet. As an adult, I'm embarrassed to say that prior to that course, I had very little understanding of the role of DARPA, had never read Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think," or Dr. Englebart's "Augmenting Human Intellect."

I learned of these men and the forces that contributed to the development of the World Wide Web, on a MOOC. I participated in the peer-review of hundreds of papers, written by fellow classmates from around the world, all from my office laptop.

I am a person.

Conclusion: People do learn from MOOCs.

Education is being transformed by the technology the Mr. Cerf helped create. Your post reminds me of one particular way that the paradigm of pass vs. fail is shifting.

In a traditional course, a professor may lecture to several hundred students per term, and given a normal distribution of results, some excel while others "fail." We would probable deem the class a success if the majority of the students achieved a "C" or better.

Contrast that to a Massive Open Online Course that attracts 20,000 participants, and "passes" only 5%. Without even comparing the economic value of the "delivery system," i.e., free vs $250 per unit for a typical State University, it is not hard to see the potential impact of the MOOC, still in its infancy.

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